IBM Big Data Analytics Powers Renewable Energy Forecasting System

This project builds upon another IBM smarter-analytics initiative at Denmark's Vestas Wind Systems, a manufacturer of wind-power turbines. Vestas, using IBM's big data analytics and supercomputing technology, is able to strategically place wind turbines based on petabytes of data from weather reporters, tidal phases, sensors, satellite images, deforestation maps, and weather-modeling research. IBM said this insight cannot only deliver improvements in energy generation but also reduce maintenance and operational costs over the life of the project.
The Hybrid Renewable Energy Forecaster represents advancements in weather modeling technology, stemming from other IBM innovations such as Deep Thunder. Deep Thunder provides high-resolution, micro-forecasts for weather in a region--ranging from a metropolitan area up to an entire state--with calculations as fine as every square kilometer. When coupled with business data, it can help businesses and governments tailor services, change routes and deploy equipment to minimize the effects of major weather events by reducing costs, improving service and even saving lives, IBM officials said.
IBM also addressed the issue of renewable energy in a recent deal with the city of Geraldton, Australia. IBM and Market Creations, a business-solutions provider based in the City of Greater Geraldton, announced a multi-million dollar deal to help the city to become a carbon-neutral region and emerge as a hub for sustainable and renewable energy.
Geraldton is the administrative center of the Australian Midwest’s industry base, which includes mining, fishing, manufacturing, construction, agriculture and tourism. The city is projected to grow rapidly over the next decade, with more than $27 billion Australian dollars of planned investments for the region, IBM said.

IBM and Market Creations will design and construct a cloud-enabled data center in Geraldton to help the city realize its goals of energy efficiency and economic competitiveness.

“With Geraldton fast becoming a strategic service for industries across Western Australia, we have a responsibility to ensure that our city develops and expands in a sustainable way–and without compromising the quality of life for our citizens as the economic growth of the city continues to accelerate,” said Ian Carpenter, mayor of the City of Greater Geraldton, in a statement. “Geraldton needs to be able to best leverage scalable and resilient technology to support our vision of becoming a technologically advanced and carbon-neutral hub. The new data center will help provide that platform as the first stage of this exciting digital evolution for our city and citizens.”
Under the contract, IBM will design and construct a scalable modular data center with the uptime, security and resiliency features needed to sustain growth. The data center will be designed for a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.3 or less, making it one of the most energy-efficient data centers in Australia.
The data center will have the ability to scale up to four times its current capacity, a key requirement that aligns with the City of Greater Geraldton’s projected growth. The cloud capabilities will enable the facility to operate as a multi-tenanted data center.